The CDC's confusing new recommendations, how local control fuels inequality, tough questions for EWA: best education journalism of the week July 30

This is an archive version of the Friday newsletter. You can read the original version here.

TEACHER DIVERSITY PROBLEMS, USA
Best education journalism of the week

🏆 BEST: The best education journalism of the week is More students of color are attending Cape Cod schools. But the vast majority of teachers are white by Jenna Russell in the Boston Globe. For a time, the largest school district in Cape Cod appeared to be making strides to diversify its teacher workforce, but Russell reports that today those numbers are even lower. It’s a problem that many schools have faced, even without Cape Cod’s high housing costs or remote location. “Could swap out ‘Cape Cod’ for ‘USA,’” commented education professor Adam Laats on Twitter. He’s not wrong. And there may be no more vivid issue in education than the racial mismatch between kids and their teachers.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is It started with a mock ‘slave trade’ and a school resolution against racism. Now a war over critical race theory is tearing this small town apart by Hannah Natanson in the Washington Post. Natanson traces the arc of a critical race theory controversy that began with an incident of racism at a mostly white school in Traverse City, Michigan. She describes how the school passed an equity resolution that was broadly supported at first, but then became politicized. “Events in Traverse City would demonstrate how quickly efforts to address historic disparities or present-day racial harassment in schools can become fodder for a campaign against critical race theory,” Natanson writes.

🏆 BONUS STORIES:
Freedom Schools, built for Black children, tackle literacy and love (Philadelphia Inquirer)
A New Window Into How San Diego Schools Are Performing (Voice of San Diego)
Soaring Inflation Curbing Schools’ Ability to Purchase, Hire and Build (The 74)
Homeschooling is drawing many more Black and Asian families (The Washington Post)
Infighting plagued pandemic hubs, report says (SF Chronicle)
Schools PR chief launched secret effort to save Runcie (Sun-Sentinel)

CDC CHANGES COURSE ON MASKS
The big story of the week, according to us.

The big story of the week is how schools are responding to the CDC’s new recommendations, calling for universal masking in schools regardless of community infection levels or vaccination status:

🔊 Debates over mask mandates stir anger and confusion (Washington Post)
🔊 Covid-19 Surge Prompts Schools to Reconsider Face-Mask Rules for Fall (WSJ)
🔊 CDC changes course as delta variant complicates fall planning (Chalkbeat)
🔊 LAUSD to require testing of students, staff regardless of vaccination status (LA Times)
🔊 CDC’s reversal triggers mixed reactions among families and educators (Boston Globe)
🔊 CT reviewing CDC mask guidance for K-12 schools (CT Mirror)
🔊 Governor Says Students Won’t Face New Mask Mandates in the Fall (Texas Tribune)
🔊 Despite CDC urging, SC school districts can’t mandate masks (The State)
🔊 Federal and state officials now recommend masks in Alabama schools (AL.com)
🔊 CDC recommends masks. Many IN schools are going back without them. (Indy Star)
🔊 Masks up for debate again at suburban districts (Chicago Tribune)

To get daily education headlines and hear about education journalism events, follow @thegrade_. To read media commentary and discuss coverage issues, follow @alexanderrusso.

TO COVER INEQUALITY, INVESTIGATE LOCAL CONTROL
New from The Grade

Everyone is writing about inequality these days. And that’s a good thing. But educational researcher Morgan Polikoff argues in a new column this week that journalists too rarely grapple with a big piece of the inequity problem in schools: local control of school districts.

An education professor at USC, Polikoff argues that school district boundaries and access to curriculum are two of many examples of local control-fueled inequality that merit more coverage from education journalists — a dynamic that doesn’t get the attention it warrants from media coverage of schools.

While more investigation of local control’s effects is needed, Polikoff spotlights strong examples from Vox, Education Week, and Hechinger Report. But one-off stories aren’t enough, he writes, “we need serious investigations of the strengths and weaknesses of local control structures, especially in the most decentralized states (which often happen to be highly populous and quite blue).”

Coming soon: A look at how one Cleveland nonprofit is helping to fill the void of dwindling education coverage, The Grade’s annual newsroom diversity survey, and suggestions for covering math instruction better in 2021-2022.

3 WHITE GUYS IN A ROW
Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.

Above: The past, current, and proposed new board presidents for EWA, the national organization representing journalists who cover American schools.

While newsroom leaders (and education editors) are becoming less white and male, that’s not the case when it comes to the topmost position of the Education Writers Association (EWA) board, whose current members have just proposed a new board president who is — like his most recent two predecessors — another white guy.

Asked to explain how that came to be, current EWA board president Greg Toppo — an author and former USA Today education reporter and also a dear friend of mine — explained that there were a number of factors at play:

“We entered the process of creating the new slate of officers fully aware of the fact that EWA’s current and immediate past presidents are both white guys,” emailed Toppo.

But the board president nominee, NPR’s Steve Drummond, is also “a supremely talented and experienced journalist” who “leads a diverse team” at NPR and co-leads EWA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity (DEI) work.

Drummond was also, by tradition, the next in line to become board president — a precedent Toppo saw no need to change. The board agreed, voting unanimously to approve the new slate, which Toppo also notes is more diverse than the current lineup. By tradition, the 2023 EWA board president nominee would be Dallas Morning News education editor Eva-Marie Ayala.

Though it has developed a DEI plan and greatly diversified its panels and board membership in recent years, EWA has also stumbled in ways that might not have taken place with greater diversity at the board president and senior staff levels.

Five years ago, for example, EWA raised eyebrows when it touted its members’ racial diversity, which then as now is about 20 percent nonwhite. And just over a year ago, the organization’s leadership was challenged during a members meeting about a new inclusivity guide authored by a white male journalism professor.

I am a longtime member of EWA, and I admire the current board for all they’ve done. It’s possible that none of the other current journalist board members want to be board president, with the added unpaid time commitment it entails. However, the board president role is important, symbolically and substantively. And in the middle of a reckoning over how journalism has been practiced, putting another white man in the top spot seems like an unfortunate outcome. I hope that the board can find another solution.

You can read Toppo’s full statement here. Read more about the rules governing the nomination of board members here.

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HIRES, JOBS, KUDOS
Who’s going where & doing what?

Above, left to right: The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Chapman, Chalkbeat Indiana’s Aleksandra Appleton, and Politico’s Jessica Calefati.

🔥 Welcome! Former New York Daily News education reporter Ben Chapman is the newest K-12 national reporter at the Wall Street Journal, replacing Tawnell Hobbs after a little more than two years covering the NYC crime beat. A couple years ago, I talked to him about his experience covering NYC schools, in which he urged education reporters to cover the system more aggressively. Las Vegas Review-Journal education reporter Aleksandra Appleton is heading to Chalkbeat Indiana as its newest state reporter. And former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jessica Calefati says on Twitter that she’s officially part of the Politico education team now, swag and all. Congrats!

🔥 Jobs: Chalkbeat is hiring for lots of positions, including reporters in Chicago, Detroit, and Tennessee. U.S. News & World Report is hiring an education reporter to cover the college beat. The Texas Tribune is hiring an education and health editor. EWA is hiring a program manager, a communications coordinator, and a program specialist. The 19th is hiring an education reporter, which could be an amazing job. KPCC and LAist are hiring a temporary higher education reporter. California’s EdSource is hiring a managing editor. The 74 is hiring a senior education reporter to focus on policy, equity, and solutions. The News-Press and Naples Daily News in Florida are hiring an education reporter.

🔥 Good advice: “Make the most of every opportunity and always keep the mission of journalism in the forefront of everything you do… Ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Then use that as the guide for everything you do in your career,” said Miami Herald executive editor Monica Richardson, who got her start covering education at the Florida Times-Union and last year became the Herald’s first Black executive editor — following a trend at some of the country’s biggest papers now headed by women or people of color.

🔥 Veteran ed reporter: The LA Times’ Howard Blume has been covering LAUSD since the mid-’90s, according to the latest LA Times education newsletter. In that time, he’s covered 10 superintendents, including the current interim Megan Reilly and her predecessor Austin Beutner, whom Blume wrote about in depth this week.

EVENTS, RESOURCES
What just happened & what’s coming next?

Above: Have you seen it? Vox has a back-to-school series this week, featuring work by Anna North, Rainesford Stauffer, Kristin Henning, Indya Brown, and Ally Shwed. The profile of Emily Oster is a vast improvement over others I’ve seen.

⏰ Newsletters: Want to keep up with all the news in the mediasphere? Here’s a collection of journalism newsletters curated by Jeremy Caplan. Last year, we rounded up some of the best newsletters for education journalists to follow. What else would you add to our list?

⏰ Resources: If you’re reporting on trauma — and let’s face it, most reporters are at least sometimes these days — be sure to read this new guide on how not to retraumatize sources by Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab. More tips? The Grade contributor Danielle Dreilinger offered a look at handling vulnerable sources and Lee Romney explained how to avoid stereotypes when covering traumatic situations.

⏰ In-person events are back: The Education Writers Association will hold its annual Higher Education Seminar Oct. 22-23 in Washington, D.C. Its 2022 National Seminar will be in Orlando, Fla., from July 24 to 26.

⏰ Upcoming: Watch for a big series dropping from The 74 on Monday. Beth Hawkins tweeted a video preview of the series, which will look at how the “K-shaped” pandemic recession is affecting schools. “We will introduce you to wrinkles in the local economies of Reno, Delaware, Austin, DC and Colorado Springs,” Hawkins wrote. “And how those wrinkles will create shock waves in schools.”

Correction: We used the wrong acronym in an item last week about a new report from NCTQ that details the quality and rigor of teacher prep programs.

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THE KICKER